Untitled from Mild Terrors II

C.K. Rajan in the mid-1990s completed a series of collage works titled Mild Terrors (1992–96). They are small compositions, made from imagery gathered from popular newspapers and magazines, using only scissors and glue. He began work on the series soon after 1991, the year that India opened up its economy to liberalization. Rajan assembled each collage quickly and intuitively. They are intimate in scale, but deft in their construction, overall compositions containing a number of visually clashing and outsized elements, with warped perspectives; all meant to convey the uneven and at times disorienting effect of the accelerated development and expansion that were taking place because of India transitions into a global neo-liberal economy. The satirical and critical orientation of these collages is not surprising, because when a student at Maharaja Sayajirao University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, Rajan was one of the youngest members of the highly politicized but short-lived group, the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association.